Which ArcaOS driver requires more work and updates?

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I had started a new poll on the main OS2World site. I think it will be interesting to know more about what is missing in the drivers that ArcaOS already provides. I know we are missing a lot of new drivers, but for this thread I wanted to discuss what can be improved on the "already provided drivers" on ArcaOS.

Regards

[Martin Iturbide]

For example I have the following:

1) Video
- Panorama support to turn off monitor when not used.
- Enable video resolution change without rebooting. Very useful for projectors and when you connect it to a TV.

2) Mouse Driver
- A way to recognize the trackpoint and trackpad and enable/disable one or another.

3) Hard Disk / Storage ?
- A way to be more compatible with different HDD geometries. Very useful for dual boot machines without having to repartition everything.

4) ACPI
- Sleep/Suspend mode (hibernate mode is a different thing)

What else do you have on your wishlist ?

Regards

[Neil Waldhauer]

1) Video
- Panorama support to turn off monitor when not used.

3) Hard Disk / Storage ?
- A way to be more compatible with different HDD geometries. Very useful for dual boot machines without having to re-partition everything.

What else do you have on your wish list ?

Finish the USB 3 driver.

Finish the Multimac WiFi driver.

Enhance OS/2 loader 64-bit memory interface to support future memory-hogging programs like QT5-Chrome.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

What else do you have on your wishlist ?

o  Enhance QSInit in recognizing available memory.

o  Wifi

o  USB 3

o  Enhance drivers for a VirtualBox client: Add mouse scrolling, add more resolution sizes, also for high resolution displays.

[Remy]

Network driver
With only 20% speed of what the system is able under windows.

To resume:
Under windows, I have 75Mbps
Under ArcaOS, I only have 10Mbps - all is going slow despite all optimization have been set (before optimization, speed was near 5 Mbps)
Next would be USB3.

[Doug Bissett]

Network driver
With only 20% speed of what the system is able under windows.

To resume:
Under windows, I have 75Mbps
Under ArcaOS, I only have 10Mbps - all is going slow despite all optimization have been set (before optimization, speed was near 5 Mbps)

This seems to depend on what program you use, and what tool you use to measure it. It also depends on what else is running at the same time. I find that the network activity will slow dramatically, if you are also doing a large write to USB. I also see many cases where IPMON says that very little network activity is taking place, but RSunc is doing a multi gigabyte data transfer, at a reasonable speed. I also have an ArcaOS machine, that is used as a NAS. I often see it doing 30 to 40 MBs (according to IPMON, which seems to be unreliable) transfer speeds. when more that one machine is working on SAMBA.

I agree that there is a problem with something, but I don't agree that it is the network driver that is causing the problem. One possibility is that all drivers (or whatever does it) will only return a speed of 100 MBs, in OS/2. If a program actually looks at that, and follows it, the speed will be governed to 100 MBs. From what I see in IPMON (which is obviously unreliable)., the speed is far less than what windows does. If I time a network transfer, at half the speed of windows, it doesn't vary much.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

I love what ArcaOS has done so far...it doesn't take much observation of the test users email list to see the activity and the amount of testing that goes on.

Having said that, I do think there are some significant outstanding issues, some of these are not at all driver software related:

1) VIDEO - there seems to be a drive towards 'Panorama ONLY' world...I do not understand why, I think SNAP from architecture perspective is a lot more promising, yet there is the push is to deploy Panorama, even though that software clearly lacks some functionality, meanwhile logging tickets to deal with Panorama issues too often results in a 'accept the black box / you do not understand this and I do / or go away' type of a response...maybe it's just personalities involved, or something else, I haven't figured it out yet

2) USB - yeah, 3.0 is becoming more of a necessity as opposed to a 'nice to have'

3) RPM / YUM - I do honestly see the value in this approach, but we consistently encounter examples of where this has not been trully embraced, from my perspective, if we deem this to be the only 'way forward' let's get a consistent and structured approach to migrating as many of the software packages to that distribution platform and let's all chip-in to make that happen...and this 'chip-in' piece is where things lack...who knows of a well written OS/2 wiki that details how to package apps into RPM? I suspect we all could help out with this, yet no leadership exists today that has the responsibility of providing that oversight, direction and support...it basically comes down to: if you are lucky/smart/experienced enough to figure it out on your own, well, consider yourself lucky...I think we could do a lot better!!!

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I think that the SNAP vs Panorama driver confusion is valid. It seems to me that since Arca Noae has control of the Panorama project it allow them to get more knowledge on that area and improvements. But SNAP was a lot bigger project and it came later under the Arca's control, so it seems it is getting them a longer time to tame the "SNAP beast". I also think that SNAP is a better, but I guess it depends on the hardware you have, and it is more like a perception following the SNAP evolution history vs Panorama's.

But it is interesting to read Arca's Wiki about Panorama: https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/panorama/
It says it is "technically not really a hardware driver at all", it says "It is simply a program (a DLL actually) that interfaces between the OS/2 video subsystem and your computer’s video BIOS." So maybe Panorama may never be a video driver, and when a functionality of a video driver is asked to be include in Panorama it may not be possible because it depends too much on the BIOS.

Also interesting:

This approach has both its benefits and its drawbacks. The benefit is that Panorama will work on every system that has a standard VESA BIOS version 2.0 or higher — which is almost every system in existence. The drawback is that it is restricted by the capabilities and limitations of that VESA BIOS.

One common limitation is video acceleration. Most VESA BIOS only support basic operations and do not support the advanced features of the video chipset such as acceleration.

I really don't know the "VESA BIOS" roadmap or plans for the future, so, no idea. Panorama may have some kind of limit against a hardware video driver according to what I can understand

...meanwhile logging tickets to deal with Panorama issues too often results in a 'accept the black box / you do not understand this and I do / or go away' type of a response...maybe it's just personalities involved, or something else, I haven't figured it out yet

That is bad. Maybe the driver development chore has became too overwhelming and it is time for Arca Noae to hire more full time developers on this area. And "Yes", OS/2 driver developers do not grow in trees, but as a company the common thing is to train more people and walk the road from "sucking at drivers development", to "bad", to "decent", to "good", nobody is born with that skills. But it is just an opinion, I don't know the internal of their business, just what is public.   

Regards